Superman: The Movie remains the gold standard of all live-action superhero flicks.
It wasn’t the first. It was preceded by plenty of cheap movie serials and Adam West’s boffo Batman movie where he tries to keep from throwing a bomb on a bunch of baby ducks. It isn’t even necessarily the best – it’s just the standard by which all other superhero stuff ought to be measured. It was the first movie to treat its subject matter as something worthy of respect – as a modern, archetypal myth rather than a pulpy throwaway. It had a big budget, an impressive cast, and state-of-the-art special effects for 1978, which look a little cornball in comparison to today’s CGI, but not as embarrassingly bad as you might suspect. And it had the one element that can make or break a superhero flick:
Verisimilitude.
Director Richard Donner reportedly used that word over and over while he was filming the first two Supes movies. His goal was to create as real and truthful a world as possible – or as real and truthful as a world can be with some dude in blue tights flying around everywhere. That’s the thing that makes or breaks a superhero flick, in my estimation. Adam West’s campy Batman world bears only a passing resemblance to the world we live in. Christopher Reeve’s Superman stepped into a world very much like our own, which gave the whole experience a heft and gravitas usually absent from celluloid superhero stories.
I bring all this up to say, in a roundabout way, that I didn’t much like Iron Man 2.
I liked Iron Man 1 a lot, though, largely for the same reasons the first Superman flick worked. Tony Stark was a creature of our universe, and while the storyline was farfetched, it was grounded in enough reality that if you squinted your brain hard enough, you could believe it could sorta actually happen, maybe.
Iron Man 2 threw all that out the window. From the outset, with the jokey, silly Senate hearing, we leave the real world and enter Comic Book World, where good people are good and bad people are bad and things just sort of happen because it’s fun to watch things blow up. The movie is considerably denser than the first, and I use that word in application of both of its meanings. It’s both dense – marked by compactness or crowding together of parts – and dense – thickheaded and stupid.
Indeed, so much happens that you get the sense that the whirlwind of activity is designed to distract you from the truth that the movie is hollow at its core. And due to some fine performances by actors who are better than the material they’ve been employed to serve, they almost get away with it.
But not quite.
The performances are fine, I guess, although I’m not sure if it’s Sam Rockwell’s fault that his character is so deeply annoying. Mickey Rourke looks all scary, but he has very little to do other than show off his tattoos. Black Widow is a complete cipher who looks like she was inserted into the film solely to give the girls an avatar they can use to play the Iron Man 2 Wii game.
Is this a movie about Tony Stark facing his mortality? Because we never get the feeling his life is in danger, even as his neck gets all purple and veiny. Is it about Tony Stark confronting the legacy of his absent father? Because that comes up and is solved a few minutes later, miraculously, by what amounts to a Skype from the past to set up a Deus ex Machina that would have been irrelevant to Tony’s father but comes in quite handy for Tony today. Is it about Tony and Pepper’s brewing relationship? Because they have three total scenes together, and two of them are spent berating each other, with no forward motion in the relationship. Is it about Tony and Justin Hammer’s professional rivalry? Because Hammer is clearly an imbecile and a campy refugee from some other, less interesting movie. Is it about the creation of the Avengers? Because that’s essentially a parallel movie that ends with a final scene after the credits where verisimilitude disappears altogether.
That’s where this loses me completely. One of the reasons that Christopher Nolan’s two Batman flicks work so well is that he’s scrubbed all elements of Comic Book World out of them. If The Dark Knight had taken place in the same universe where Kal-El from Krypton was rocketed to Kansas, it would be forced to play by a new set of rules that would lessen the impact of the verisimilitude Nolan had so painstakingly created. Comic Book World was kept at bay with the first Iron Man movie, but now Tony Stark will share screen time in an Avengers flick with a thunder god from Norse mythology. I just don’t see any way that can work.
Disappointing.
I hope Toy Story 3 doesn’t suck.
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